Straightforward singing from Dawn Upshaw

Allan Ulrich, EXAMINER MUSIC CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Monday, April 12, 1999

FEET UNSHOD and dressed in something resembling your mother's old slipcovers, Dawn Upshaw dropped into the Herbst Theatre Sunday evening for another of her approximately annual recitals. With the incomparable Gilbert Kalish at the piano, the American soprano - as much a product of record industry hype as her own talents - again found this listener divided between respect and bewilderment at the Upshaw phenomenon.

On one matter there can be no doubt: Upshaw knows how to build a recital program, balancing the old with the new, the familiar with the offbeat, finding thematic correspondences that often afford revelations. For this San Francisco Performances event, the fare included four standard Mozart songs, Ravel's "Histoires Naturelles" and three Vernon Duke numbers from a recent Nonesuch compact disc.

The rarities were four songs by the contemporary French master Olivier Messiaen, and two works that received their second performances here, James Primrosch's "Holy the Firm" and Osvaldo Golijov's "Lua Descolorida."

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It is easy to understand why composers like Primrosch line up to write for Upshaw. She delivers material with a disarming honesty without interpretive quirks. She offers dead-on intonation, she savors word values, she shows great attention to dynamics.

Upshaw is also a talker. We're told by marketing mavens that talking from the concert platform is a great way to increase audiences. The shoes, we were informed Sunday, were discarded because the soprano's feet hurt. Illuminating, to be sure. Upshaw's forthright persona is, of course, a matter of taste.

It carries over into her singing. The Mozart group was much more than promising. Upshaw delivered some interesting variants in "An Chloe." She found a modicum of drama in "Als Luise die Briefe inhres ungetreun Liebhabers verbrannte" (On Louise's Burning her Faithless Lover's Letters), amply projected the mock heroism of "Der Zauberer" (The Magician) and, despite a few leaden notes, brought a silvery tone to

"Abendemfindung" (Evening Thoughts).

The juxtaposition of "Holy the Firm" and the Messiaen - both concerning various aspects of spiritual ecstasy - made for absorbing listening. Primrosch's brief cycle gathers verse by three women - Denise Levertov, Annie Dillard and Susan Stewart - and the seventh century monk, John Climacus. The settings are expansive, with lots of busy figurations in the piano, yet the words remain paramount. Upshaw rendered it with a glowing integrity.

But when the music demands vocal coloration, there's less satisfaction. Upshaw doesn't deny her audiences linguistic clarity, but she seems not to respond to the sensuous aspects of other tongues. And the Messiaen songs, despite the composer's Catholic fervor, are astonishingly sensuous. Kalish certainly did his all Sunday, yet there's a perfume to a work like "Amour oiseau d'etoile" (Love star-bird) that this singer rarely uncorks. Still, it was possible to share Upshaw's mood of jubilation during "Resurrection."

Golijov, the Argentine who has written so eloquently for the Kronos Quartet, is on the evidence of "Lua Descolorida" (Moon Colorless), a songwriter of rare allure. The sinuous, almost melismatic vocal line demands an interpreter with less spunkiness and more mystery in her throat, a young Victoria de los Angeles, perhaps.

Coyness killed "Histoires Naturelles" (Nature Stories) for this listener. Ravel's setting of Jules Renard's droll bestiary needs more sophistication than Upshaw mustered. The best of them was Ravel's exquisite setting of "Le Grillon" (the Cricket), where Upshaw gauged the mood perfectly.

That Vernon Duke album seemed the most overrated crossover project of the year; and of the three songs Upshaw delivered (in quirky arrangements by Eric Stern and Fred Hersch), only "April in Paris" convinced one that the composer was a neglected master of music theater. If you've heard Frank Sinatra or Jo Stafford at ease in this material, you were likely to find Upshaw downright arch by comparison. And the best entry on that CD,